Welcome
Booking is now open for all these films.
Friday 7th Feb, 8.00 pm: Judy, cert 12A
Saturday 15th Feb, 8.00 pm: The Peanut Butter Falcon, cert 12A
We then have a break whilst Thame Players prepare their next production.
Saturday 1st of February, 8 pm
Bait
UK 2019, 89 minutes, 15 certificate
Directed by Mark Jenkin, Starring Ed Rowe, Mary Woodvine, Giles Smith, Simon Shepherd
Jenkin’s drama is about the community of a Cornish fishing village and the events of one very recent summer. But, wait: if that sentence has you thinking Fisherman’s Friends or Doc Martin or perhaps the majesty of the Cornish coast a la Poldark then think again. This is emphatically NOT like any of these things. This arresting small masterpiece is, in fact, not like anything you are likely to have seen of late.
Jenkin’s resolutely unglossy drama explores the politics of land ownership and the economic realities of contemporary Cornwall.
Martin and Steven Ward are brothers in middle age and their family has been fishing the local waters for generations. But times have changed and the brothers have fallen out. Martin still eaks out a living selling his small catch to locals; the few mackerel and sea bass and lobsters he collects by hand with nets and lobster pots. Steven, meanwhile has abandoned fishing altogether, and uses their late father’s boat to cater to the new economy of tourists, taking parties of stag-do drunks and the like on scenic jaunts around the surrounding coastline. For Martin, Steven’s choice amounts to capitulation to the enemies in a war of class and economics. Those enemies are embodied by Tim and Sandra Leigh, well heeled Londoners who purchased the small cottage on the harbour from the Ward brothers’ father, and who pop down in the Land Rover for a few weeks here and there with their Waitrose shopping and litres of prosecco, and rent out the room upstairs as an Air BnB. Martin can’t even park his van on the harbour anymore. The stand off between the Wards and the Leighs extends across the village community and through to the next generation; tensions mount and events ensue.
Aside from being a strident take on the politics of his native Cornwall, and a lament for its proud industrial past, Jenkin’s film is an homage to the very nature of film making and the history of the moving image. Using grainy black and white film stock, making full use of close ups and startling montage, with dialogue that is ever so slightly unhinged from the image, Jenkin has made formal choices that put us on edge, adding to a sense of unease, underscoring the tension between two groups of people who scarcely speak the same language.
This is an intense psychological drama that references early expressionist film makers but also a document of British life consistent with the work of the great early pioneers of documentary film making.
Hypnotic, poetic, this really is an exceptional film, defiantly unlike anything else you will have seen, and hailed as one of the defining British films of the decade.
